New Year skis in

The Smith Mountain Lake ski club sticks to its wet tradition.

By Erinn Hutkin
The Roanoke Times

The first time Todd Rowland considered not hitting the water was three years ago. The wind blew at 20 mph. It was 30 degrees and sunny.

The water felt even colder.

Teeth chattering, he remembers carrying his water ski gear to a dock at Smith Mountain Lake. He told himself he was crazy.

Instead of changing his mind, he walked into to the warm house and changed into every stitch of clothing he could find. When he was too hot to take the heat anymore, he started the new year by water skiing.

It's a tradition the lake's water ski club has honored for 13 years, and Sunday was no exception. Every Jan. 1, team members make sure they are first to glide across the lake by holding an annual polar bear ski day.

Each year, the temperature is different. The names and faces are different. The amount of time the skiers stay on the lake is different -- affected largely by the weather, the number of skiers and how much everyone drank the night before.

Yet no matter how warm, no matter how cold, some things never change.

Each year, standing on the dock, Rowland tries talking himself out of going. Each year, Rowland compares the feeling to a tractor-trailer being parked on his chest. Muscles contract. Forget breathing.

Each year, he tunes out the cold as he skids across water -- until he returns to the dock and chills set in.

And afterward each year, the experience feels a little like a fountain of youth, the 36-year-old explains. The feeling -- being refreshed and revived -- sometimes sticks around for weeks.

He's never been sick, never had the sniffles or pneumonia from his New Year's jaunt -- despite his mother's warnings.

About a dozen skiers waited their turn on the dock Sunday. The weather was warm for January -- in the 50s.

The water was not.

Ski team member Tom Tanner estimated the lake was no warmer than 45 degrees. To the touch of bare skin, the lake felt about as warm as a faucet stream early on a chilly morning.

Some who skied wore wet suits. Some wore swim trunks. Some, like 4-year-old Emma Barber -- the afternoon's first skier -- wore a life jacket over her bikini.

In fact, Rowland, the ski club president, keeps hoping for a New Year's Day with some authentic weather -- subzero temperatures, snow and an ice-crusted lake.

But that does doesn't mean the tradition is not without stories.

One year, water in the boat exhaust was frozen. They couldn't get the engine started, so they had to ski behind a fishing boat instead.

In 1997, Rowland crashed into the dock and cracked his wake board -- still attached to his feet. He rolled down the dock, bare legs exposed.

"I didn't get wet," he said "But I got bloody."

Rowland and team member Sara Roach, a 22-year-old graduate student at the University of Florida, are the only two who've hit the water each January since the tradition began.

She always wears a wet suit, which Rowland says is like cheating.

He noticed that the sun began to peek through the clouds.

That's a little like cheating, too.

Sunday, Roach sat on the dock with her heavy, ski-strapped feet dipped in the lake.

"Ho-lee Mo-lee," she gasped to the touch of cold water.

Rowland, meanwhile, prefers black swim trunks and a matching life vest. Roach dared him to ski suitless one year, which he's done ever since.

"The water's cold," he shouted from the water to onlookers on the boat.

"Go figure," someone called back.

The beauty of water skiing in January is the lack of traffic on the lake.

But in his wet suit topped by swim trunks, Kyle Rowland, 14, from Virginia Beach, skied as if it were July.

He jumped waves. He flipped in a summersault in midair. He threw a wave at onlookers.

"Wake boarding's my life," he said from the dock, where his nose was red from the cold. "I'll take it any chance I get."

Meanwhile, Ginger Tanner looked for waterproof gloves to wear with her wet suit.

"These jeans I'm wearing got flannel lining," a man on the dock told her. "You want them, too?"

Her time on the lake was capped by surfing to a stop, then falling sideways into the lake.

She shot up a with wet, slicked-back blonde hair and wide eyes. Back on the dock, she wore a towel over her head like a nun's habit.

After all, the weather was warm for January -- in the 50s. The water was not.